Image alt text: Refugee placing a portable solar panel on a shelter roof in a displacement camp in Bangladesh

Every morning in the camp at Teknaf, Bangladesh, Mohammed Saber climbs to the roof of his family’s bamboo-and-tarpaulin home and sets out a single rectangular solar panel. He has done this for six years, since his family fled the Myanmar military’s crackdown on the Rohingya people in 2017. “We can now charge our phones, cook with light, children can study at night and use fans during the hot season,” says Saber, 35. A small panel on a makeshift roof, and an entire household runs on it.

The same thing is happening in camps and disaster zones around the world. Solar has been edging into humanitarian response for years; what’s shifted is how seriously organizations are taking it, less as an experiment and more as something people actually need.

From lanterns to cook stoves

The range of what “solar kit” means is wider than it might sound. Sarah Rosenberg-Jansen, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, describes the category as spanning solar lanterns, torches, and heating pads to full solar home systems and electric cook stoves. The common thread is portability and independence from the grid, which matters most when infrastructure is gone and things are moving fast. “In emergency situations, solar kits can be deployed immediately,” she says.

That’s playing out across multiple places at once. In Karachi, Doctors Without Borders runs a tuberculosis clinic on solar power. In South Sudan’s Renk County, the UN migration agency installed solar-powered water filtration for families displaced by the war in neighboring Sudan. When Nepal’s floods killed 1,455 people and left 5,285 missing in August, local and international organizations distributed solar kits to survivors cut off from the grid. In Ukraine, a nonprofit called Hope For Ukraine has provided kits to thousands of families living through a war, including older residents who adapted without trouble. “We have grandmas and grandpas who are around 75 to 80 years old receiving kits,” says CEO Yuriy Boyechko. “It’s just a matter of plug and play.”

Why costs finally shifted

Solar panels don’t carry the same price volatility as fossil fuels, which are expensive and difficult to transport into disaster zones under ordinary circumstances and near-impossible when infrastructure has been destroyed. Only a few decades ago, solar was a luxury technology. Mass manufacturing and steady advances in efficiency changed that, and the price drop put solar kits within reach of humanitarian budgets in ways they weren’t before.

Funding cuts and the waiting list

What’s slowing things down now isn’t the technology. Aid organizations have long-running contracts built around diesel generators, and switching to solar means trusting new equipment, building new distribution chains, and sometimes doing that in genuinely hazardous conditions. Mark Gibson of the Global Platform for Action, a group promoting clean energy access, notes that the transition has been complicated for organizations with established logistics in place.

Cuts to international donor funding have made it harder. Aimee Jenks, a program leader at GPA, was direct: “Much of the technical expertise in the humanitarian sector on energy has been cut. That’s now retracting a lot of progress.”

Hope For Ukraine’s own numbers show how stretched the system is. By the end of 2026, the organization expects to have distributed more than 3,200 solar kits, a number that took two years to reach because of funding. “We have a waiting list of about 20,000 families,” Boyechko says. “We just cannot keep up with demand.”

For Saber, the gap between what’s available and what people have isn’t an abstraction. His family has had their panel for six years, long enough to know exactly what changed. “It’s improved my family’s life,” he says.